When the WA government issued a draft of its first independent policy on Aboriginal development (Resilient Families, Strong Communities: A Roadmap for Regional and Remote Aboriginal Communities) in mid July, it signalled the final act in a drama that began with the failure of WA land rights in 1985. This is a story of agreements made and broken between the state of Western Australia and the federal government – agreements not assessed by committees of parliament and not made transparent to citizens. It is also a story of fundamental changes in policy that neither the state nor the Commonwealth has seen fit to run past the citizenry, let alone the Aboriginal people most affected. A new roadmap for resilient Aboriginal families and strong communities is needed not just in Western Australia but also in all remote areas of Australia. It is needed because the Commonwealth has overturned the forty-five years of policy consensus under which it funded Aboriginal housing, local roads, water and electricity supplies, sanitation and community administration. The instruments of choice were the bilateral agreements with the states that followed the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2005, reinforced by the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing, signed in 2008.

Roadmaps are useless if the road is too rough to travel. If our remote communities are to thrive, rather than wither at the end of the track, the Commonwealth must re-engage with Aboriginal development in the spirit of 1967, and the system of remote and rural equalisation funding must be entirely overhauled. Incremental changes introduced behind closed doors by pragmatic bureaucrats have the tendency to evolve into fully formed disaster before the public notices. Burdening local governments with responsibilities previously met by the Commonwealth threatens to be the tipping point for rural and outback decay. Before it reaches that point it should instead be used as a springboard for a national inquiry into sustainably funding the outback for black and white alike.